Ingrid Pui Yee Chu: Congratulations Ellen, on guest curating Art Basel Hong Kong’s Film sector, and Venus, on programming a day of talks for Conversations. Ellen, considering how much your pioneering media work has shaped the art and technology landscape of Hong Kong, has the advent of AI influenced your approach?

Ellen Pau: I’m aware of the changing image culture industry but I’m not focused on AI per se. That said, I may expand my curatorial framing to find works that use AI as a tool to generate moving images, and critical discourses interrogating this process.

IPYC: This would certainly link regional moving image histories to any future AI may have as art.

Venus Lau: The art world’s response to AI is just part of how we connect our thoughts to big data and the tech landscape now – not only for image production, but also for knowledge production. We need to recalibrate what creativity means with new technologies; it’s like when photography appeared and people said, ‘art will die, the aura will disappear.’ As for machines thinking like humans, we still haven’t figured out how consciousness works.

IPYC: Perhaps it is by not totally understanding human consciousness, that imagination can flourish.

EP: If AI becomes a thinking legal entity using language to communicate, it will really redefine art.

IPYC: Venus, your mission at Museum MACAN in Jakarta, where you serve as director is to foster ‘dynamic cross-cultural dialogue and public engagement across Asia’s art scene.’ Will your day-long Conversations program also relay these experiences?

VL: I’m curating three panels on gold as a metaphor for crossing different geographical or cultural demarcations. Gold is self-referential; that’s why it’s been a stable ‘hard currency’ across time, from ancient Egyptian masks to smartphone microchips. Even the liquid indicator bio-tracking the COVID-19 virus in those self-testing kits is colloidal gold. It reminded me: gold is biopolitical, not just financial or geological.

My panelists (including Steph Huang, Shuang Li, Joshua Serafin, Kathleen Ditzig, Herbert Hans, Kandis Williams, and Angela Su) are coming from Hong Kong, Berlin, the Philippines, Belgium, and elsewhere to exchange ideas about horror and fear as social apparatus, and how monstrosity and spectrality affect their work in a turbulent world.

One panel is about how technology – outside AI – is changing the hardware, software, and mentality around art-making. Another talk is about fluidity; from image flux on the internet to actual supply chain ‘flows’. The core is still about art and creativity but discussing cross-border conventions and having cross-cultural conversations will complicate the dominant ‘East-meets-West’ narrative.

IPYC: Will anything change from editions you previously participated in or attended? 

EP: It’s an honor to curate the Film Program, but I’m still learning how to connect different institutions, independent spaces, artists, and galleries. I want to bring them together and give them a platform to talk about Hong Kong and Southeast Asian art. 

Another aim is to expand the audience base through a program people enjoy, understand, and talk about, including the role of the market in Hong Kong’s art ecology. It benefits those who are making moving images, but also pushes Art Baselto consider new presentation methods – to progress beyond the screen, with a lot of different, more interactive, object-based installations. I’m trying to find good places to show works that expand our views about moving image media. That’s what I want to bring this year.

IPYC: Of course, audiences will come to your screens with their screens. In terms of your setup, have you thought about modes of social engagement and documenting these experiences?  

EP: The program should bring knowledge to more people, but I’m happy if visitors produce their own memories and more promotion is good. The public want to have encounters with art, so they take photographs or videos. If they enjoy the arts, they will come back, which is what I want – to make a film program everybody can come and see. There are no tickets. There’s no one taking you to an assigned seat. You can come and enjoy it or walk out if you don’t like it. That’s the perfect scenario for me. 

朱佩瑿：談到這個，巴塞爾藝術展在與非營利機構、出版機構的合作方面有著悠久歷史，在展會的部分區域，觀眾可以自由地接觸當代藝術，或參與「與巴塞爾藝術展對話」等項目。

劉秀儀：我一直是「與巴塞爾藝術展對話」的忠實擁躉，也非常榮幸這次能首次擔任連續三場對談的主持人。巴塞爾藝術展確實是一個進行商業交易、買賣藝術品的藝術展會，但同時，它也是一個思想交流的平台。

朱佩瑿：這些對談匯聚了國際藝術界的資深人士，而親臨現場感受思想碰撞、進行面對面對話的機會，往往能催生出令人耳目一新的創意火花。在確定當下趨勢和研討議題時，你是否會與藝術家及藝廊進行協作？

劉秀儀：在策劃對談活動時，我與藝廊的互動方式是靈活且務實的，這與我組織藝術展覽或文化活動的流程相似。有時，我會考量藝術家個體即將參與的藝術項目所在的特定展區，亦或是圍繞一個既定主題，有意識地去發掘其創作實踐與之契合的藝術家。我通常會優先聯繫藝術家本人，隨後再與藝廊取得聯繫，但整個流程是靈活演變的，陣容也可能隨之調整。

鮑藹倫：我喜歡直接跟藝術家或電影人打交道，但在巴塞爾藝術展的框架下，我們也會與藝廊、公關機構和媒體進行溝通。我很高興地宣佈，今年巴塞爾藝術展將攜手韓國藝術管理服務機構（Korea Arts Management Service，KAMS）及《Art Review》，聯合呈獻一項特別活動。屆時，將有韓國藝術家金雅瑛（Ayoung Kim）和藝術團體ikkibawiKrrr參與映後對談。

IPYC: It’s clear these programs extend your work leading multiple non-profits and event-based initiatives, in recording the region’s rapidly developing ‘on-the-go’ art history.

EP: The heart of my work is recording and representing the region’s art history. Every day, we work with a wide range of moving images, and the digital art realm has expanded the film medium in many ways I want to explore.

IPYC: Exactly – you’re tracking a living, breathing sense of where society is going through the moving image.   

VL: I considered two aspects when you brought up ‘ecosystems’: one pragmatic, the other being what you described – the bleed between art and different cultural disciplines. After experiencing institutional practices or event-based programming within a growing ecosystem in Greater China, you find out what doesn’t work for community building, and in regions with very different ideas about art.

As for crossovers, my Conversations take art as a vantage point to look at different cultural industries. What shapes our ideas? What are the new forms and patterns in this ecosystem we can interact with and nurture? These are my starting points.  

Art Basel Hong Kong takes place from March 27 to 29, 2026. Tickets available here.

Ingrid Pui Yee Chu is a Hong Kong-based curator and writer. 

Caption for header image: Art Basel Hong Kong 2025.

Published on February 23, 2026.